Beautiful Eleanor! I agree with so much of this! For me, singing folk songs is a parallel lineage that I have drawn from in my learning, alongside reading books. Folk songs are an oral form & the singing of them is an act of memory & recall, so I have been privileged to experience & observe memory in action a lot. The architecture of memory is universal in humans: it was the way important information was transmitted down through time for millennia. However, it's also a set of muscles, that atrophy from disuse. I know people in their 80s with 500 songs stored in their head. And I know people in their early 20s who don't dare to even attempt to remember. (The old people are proof of what's possible! Be more like them!)
Some things I have learnt about memory:
Writing down is good for learning, listening repeatedly is good for learning, reciting or singing is good for learning. These are all aspects of memorising practice.
Reciting or singing while walking is particularly good. A lonely beach or hillside means you can really get into it with nobody watching.
Rhyme, rhythm, & repetition are memory aids: this is why old ballads & songs are structured the way they are. They also grant breathing space for the mind: while you are repeating an 'easy' bit (a chorus, a response, a repetition, or some nonsense sounds) another part of your brain can be remembering the 'hard' bit that comes next.
You can rely on the paper while you are learning, but at a certain point you have to throw the paper away, jump in the deep end, & try to remember. Otherwise you will never prove to yourself that you can do it. I also think that at a certain point the paper becomes a crutch: if you have the option of it, you will be tempted to look at it, rather than attempting to remember.
One interesting thing with folk singing is there can be a 'group memory', where if you forget someone else remembers, & can prompt you. I just got back from a festival where we had many singing sessions; some people sang from handwritten books of songs (mostly newer singers, just learning) but many of us sang purely from memory all weekend.
I have a lot of visual metaphors for how it feels to remember. To remember a song is like pulling a string. But there is also the sense of walking a pathway. I have heard it compared to a heap of stones. Learning a song can be rote but often it is not, often there is a story inside the song: story makes remembering easier.
Once something-memorised is in long-term storage it can be pretty fixed (as in you will be able to remember it more easily), but generally speaking, you do need to keep re-polishing the silverware you have stored away: you do need to take things out to keep them fresh.
Put things in your mouth, put them in your head-bone, they can't take that away! Store up treasure that goes with you always!
Don't know if I've shared this with you before but... Walter Benjamin on the power of copying out texts. Not quite memorising but I think you mentioned it as a medieval practice in an earlier piece? I have 500+ money quotes on my old blog and copied each of them (i.e. typed them in by hand). Benjmain's quote made sense of that for me.
I've long had the desire to memorise the opening of Under Milk Wood. If you keep writing so persausively I'm going to be adding that as pledge to the Book of Horkus next January and will be forced to learn it for fear of upsetting the Gods (and Daisy)!
Do it! You must. I insist. (But also… don’t mention Horkos! I pledged in the cycle and haven’t started yet, oops!)
And this is super interesting about Benjamin and copying out. I was saying in memory club the other day that I always did pretty well in exams basically because I realised at an early age that if I wrote out everything I needed to remember long-hand, it would get absolutely lodged in my memory. These days I still write out quotes from books long-hand, when I’m reading for research. Typing, though, does nothing for me.
I'm a slow words-out-loud in my head reader. I can do the speed read thing but I don't like it. Especially for my money stuff. And I write quicker than I type. So it might be about that slowing down thing. Equally, I like the idea of a the visceral physical act of writing. And actually - thinking about it - most of the quotes I type (especially the real killers) I've already written long hand in my book notes (I usually have a fold A4 sheet(s) that serves as a place marker and note keeper).
Oh bloody hell. I'm going to have to do the Dylan Thomas thing aren't I? Ten years since my last pledge and the stress was real! Good luck with yours!
I love the idea of memorisation as resistance. As a child I had to memorise poems for group recitation which I found pointless and embarrassing at the time. But those poems have stayed with me ever since and they enrich my experience at every turn, like companion voices and other ways of seeing.
Ahhh I love to hear this! I had to memorise the prologue to Romeo and Juliet and found it similarly pointless — and yet there it still is, whenever I want it.
Thanks so much for this - the idea of memory as a corrective to solipsism is really striking. I am going to be mulling this over for some time I can tell!
I love this. I first came across the idea of "Alethéa" when I was friends with a lovely colleague in a bookshop in Paris whose name that was.... Not just "remembering" I think, but "Unforgetting"...
It makes me think too of one of my favourites, Keats's Ode on Melancholy in which he enjoins the addressee to "go not to Lethe!": to not deal with their Melancholy with Oblivion, through drugs or wine or the dark slumber of poisons and graveyard dreams... My secondary school English teacher made us learn reams of poetry, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics... I may not be able to quote large chunks, but those lines still live in me and with me, and surface very often. I treasure it. Joyce, Beckett, Yeats. My holy trinity as a young Irishman. Even the Bible verses of my Catholic childhood, though I am long apostate and pagan. They bubble up, their meanings and echoes now changed to fit my own life. Recently, often:
"Though I speak with the tongues of Angels, and I speak with the tongues of Men, if I have not Love, then I am as sounding brass"
Empty vessels make most noise...
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, my Lord" (we must)
"Nothing will come of Nothing, speak again!" (we must)
"I would not go back there, no. Not with the fire in me now..." (we must grasp the flame... Fire then, fire now, the fire next time)
I love the idea that by not bringing other voices into our minds we’ve “monocropped” our interior lives. And memorization as a practice for occluding my usual crappy train of thought seems liberating! I’m so tired of my cycle of fears a grievances. What a great solution.
I was at a Rilke retreat at a monastery and the leader suggested memorizing some poetry. I’ve always panicked at the thought of work, so I’d never tried before, but this time I worked at it and found it to be really good for me.
I’m also sober a long time and very encouraged by your experience. Thank you!
A Rilke retreat at a monastery?!?! I want to go to that so badly. Glad you ended up memorising some poetry. Let me know if you end up memorising more! One of the members of our memory club is memorising some of the Duino Elegies.
This really landed for me. I'm a fairly recent 'convert' to idealism, having read several of Bernardo Kastrup's books last year, plus a couple by Thomas Nagel, and David Bentley Hart's lovely "All Things Are Full of Gods" in the last couple of years. Which is to say I'm still digesting, so to speak. And posts like this definitely help with that. I'm also putting the finishing touches on basic, accessible introduction to idealism. (As much as Feynman-esque 'if I can explain it to a non-expert that means I understand it' exercise as anything else.) And I want to follow it up with articles exploring the implications of and possibilities in idealism.
Really glad this landed! Thank you for reading. Sounds like you’re on a very rich exploration. To be honest, I really struggle to read philosophy! I do read it, but slowly, and I’m certainly not as well versed in it as I could be. I suppose I am an idealist, though I struggle so much with abstraction that I much prefer to investigate those theories through literature. And I think that great literature (and maybe all great art) has always been the sort of active branch or creative laboratory of idealism. The place where it’s enacted and explored, instead of theorized. If that makes sense?
I think exploring philosophy through literature is great. I love a novel that gets into the philosophical forest. (As well as the psychological one.)
One upside of Kastrup’s books is that they’re pretty short. The best intro to his flavor of idealism is one of, if not the, shortest (*Analytical Idealism*, if you are curious).
I’ve been meaning to tell you that I really enjoyed your book-ette. Thanks again for sending it so far!
Ah good! So glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for letting me know.
And yes — philosophical novels. But for me the more powerful literary expression of philosophy is the way, say, Shakespeare enacts the core tenets of idealism in his form. The pentameter seems to body forth the action itself. It’s like a workshop of the philosophical idea and the ideas about imagination that run through his work. Does that make sense? I find it a bit difficult to explain what I mean about this. x
I have too many thoughts on this to put them into a comment. I mostly agree. Enough to put a smile on my face. Yes, memory and perception. Busy writing a series sharing my practices of imagination. Trying to word what I think is taking place in me.
I have real bad memory for names and dates and facts and dance-steps. But I have exceptional qualities when it comes to remembering spatially, for the constellation. I feel that what I 'know' is often obstructing presence. That it shouldn't be like a filter, or label level, as is taught in schools. But deep memorization, like done with learning a song, a piece of music, a skill, allows for a new version. Really understanding the 'facts' is very revealing. Two kinds of knowing here, I think. Leave it at this for now...love your work. It's very close to my heart.
Thanks for this, Bertus. Yes, many kinds of knowing. And your note about understanding reminded me of something @Iain McGilchrist said when I saw him speak earlier this autumn: that etymologically, the “under” in “understand” means “among”. It’s a standing among, a taking things together, as a whole, and standing in their presence. In the context of this essay, we could add — in the wholeness of your own presence, too; ideally, bringing a polyphony of remembered voices.
I did a lot of acting earlier in my life and the memorization and delivery of lines did feel like quite a special skill. I too have been thinking that in person oral communication may be the only form we will be able to trust soon, other than by books. Thanks for articulating.
Yes! I've got a friend currently in academia who thinks universities will have to bring back vivas to replace essays and written exams. An interesting thought.
Franchino Gaffurio's image, Music of the Spheres' 15th century, shows the celestial bodies, the Muses and Apollo in a symbolic representation of cosmic harmony. An image to contemplate left & right brain hemispheres in flow, to aid memory practice.
The dance between the muses and Apollo corresponding to right and left brain hemispheres respectively.
I hear you. One of our speakers in our memory club is going to be a trauma therapist, talking about when memory keeps us stuck. Sounds like you’re moving forward on your journey. I hope so, and that it feels good. x
In the spring of 2023, I spent 45 days in a municipal jail in Japan. During that challenging time, I was basically cut off from the English language, and my Japanese isn’t good enough to immerse myself deeply in the Japanese language resources that were available.
One of the fascinating results of that experience was how the resonance of my dreams lasted much longer than in my regular life.
I remember having the insight that modernity, with all of its busy-bee distractions, has eroded the art of dreaming. As fall has brought more dark than light, I’ve been allowing myself more dream time, though I must admit that I’ve been caving in to the powerfully seductive waking world and not allowing the space for the dreams to resonate beyond most mornings.
Your post gave me some inspiration to do that more, so thank you.
Last, I totally agree that the desertification of our external world is linked to the barrenness of our inner world and thank you for that reminder!
Beautiful Eleanor! I agree with so much of this! For me, singing folk songs is a parallel lineage that I have drawn from in my learning, alongside reading books. Folk songs are an oral form & the singing of them is an act of memory & recall, so I have been privileged to experience & observe memory in action a lot. The architecture of memory is universal in humans: it was the way important information was transmitted down through time for millennia. However, it's also a set of muscles, that atrophy from disuse. I know people in their 80s with 500 songs stored in their head. And I know people in their early 20s who don't dare to even attempt to remember. (The old people are proof of what's possible! Be more like them!)
Some things I have learnt about memory:
Writing down is good for learning, listening repeatedly is good for learning, reciting or singing is good for learning. These are all aspects of memorising practice.
Reciting or singing while walking is particularly good. A lonely beach or hillside means you can really get into it with nobody watching.
Rhyme, rhythm, & repetition are memory aids: this is why old ballads & songs are structured the way they are. They also grant breathing space for the mind: while you are repeating an 'easy' bit (a chorus, a response, a repetition, or some nonsense sounds) another part of your brain can be remembering the 'hard' bit that comes next.
You can rely on the paper while you are learning, but at a certain point you have to throw the paper away, jump in the deep end, & try to remember. Otherwise you will never prove to yourself that you can do it. I also think that at a certain point the paper becomes a crutch: if you have the option of it, you will be tempted to look at it, rather than attempting to remember.
One interesting thing with folk singing is there can be a 'group memory', where if you forget someone else remembers, & can prompt you. I just got back from a festival where we had many singing sessions; some people sang from handwritten books of songs (mostly newer singers, just learning) but many of us sang purely from memory all weekend.
I have a lot of visual metaphors for how it feels to remember. To remember a song is like pulling a string. But there is also the sense of walking a pathway. I have heard it compared to a heap of stones. Learning a song can be rote but often it is not, often there is a story inside the song: story makes remembering easier.
Once something-memorised is in long-term storage it can be pretty fixed (as in you will be able to remember it more easily), but generally speaking, you do need to keep re-polishing the silverware you have stored away: you do need to take things out to keep them fresh.
Put things in your mouth, put them in your head-bone, they can't take that away! Store up treasure that goes with you always!
Don't know if I've shared this with you before but... Walter Benjamin on the power of copying out texts. Not quite memorising but I think you mentioned it as a medieval practice in an earlier piece? I have 500+ money quotes on my old blog and copied each of them (i.e. typed them in by hand). Benjmain's quote made sense of that for me.
https://jonone100.blogspot.com/2015/09/money-wisdom-373.html
I've long had the desire to memorise the opening of Under Milk Wood. If you keep writing so persausively I'm going to be adding that as pledge to the Book of Horkus next January and will be forced to learn it for fear of upsetting the Gods (and Daisy)!
Do it! You must. I insist. (But also… don’t mention Horkos! I pledged in the cycle and haven’t started yet, oops!)
And this is super interesting about Benjamin and copying out. I was saying in memory club the other day that I always did pretty well in exams basically because I realised at an early age that if I wrote out everything I needed to remember long-hand, it would get absolutely lodged in my memory. These days I still write out quotes from books long-hand, when I’m reading for research. Typing, though, does nothing for me.
I'm a slow words-out-loud in my head reader. I can do the speed read thing but I don't like it. Especially for my money stuff. And I write quicker than I type. So it might be about that slowing down thing. Equally, I like the idea of a the visceral physical act of writing. And actually - thinking about it - most of the quotes I type (especially the real killers) I've already written long hand in my book notes (I usually have a fold A4 sheet(s) that serves as a place marker and note keeper).
Oh bloody hell. I'm going to have to do the Dylan Thomas thing aren't I? Ten years since my last pledge and the stress was real! Good luck with yours!
I read this way too! I used to find it embarrassing but I actually think it's turned out to be my only superpower. Glad to meet a fellow word-sounder.
You must do the Dylan Thomas thing if only because it would be a treat to see you in January.
I love the idea of memorisation as resistance. As a child I had to memorise poems for group recitation which I found pointless and embarrassing at the time. But those poems have stayed with me ever since and they enrich my experience at every turn, like companion voices and other ways of seeing.
Ahhh I love to hear this! I had to memorise the prologue to Romeo and Juliet and found it similarly pointless — and yet there it still is, whenever I want it.
This gave me goosebumps: "truth wasn’t a series of facts. It was a moment of remembering."
This is all very fecund, as I walk and sing my own songline across Albion, in ancestor footsteps.
Glad you enjoyed it! Godspeed with the rest of the pilgrimage.
Thanks so much for this - the idea of memory as a corrective to solipsism is really striking. I am going to be mulling this over for some time I can tell!
Thank you for reading! Glad it landed for you x
This is brilliant Ellie! Thanks for articulating such important and complex issues so clearly and succinctly 🙏🏼
Thank YOU for being on the journey. Your insights in memory club sessions have been so illuminating.
I love this. I first came across the idea of "Alethéa" when I was friends with a lovely colleague in a bookshop in Paris whose name that was.... Not just "remembering" I think, but "Unforgetting"...
It makes me think too of one of my favourites, Keats's Ode on Melancholy in which he enjoins the addressee to "go not to Lethe!": to not deal with their Melancholy with Oblivion, through drugs or wine or the dark slumber of poisons and graveyard dreams... My secondary school English teacher made us learn reams of poetry, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics... I may not be able to quote large chunks, but those lines still live in me and with me, and surface very often. I treasure it. Joyce, Beckett, Yeats. My holy trinity as a young Irishman. Even the Bible verses of my Catholic childhood, though I am long apostate and pagan. They bubble up, their meanings and echoes now changed to fit my own life. Recently, often:
"Though I speak with the tongues of Angels, and I speak with the tongues of Men, if I have not Love, then I am as sounding brass"
Empty vessels make most noise...
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, my Lord" (we must)
"Nothing will come of Nothing, speak again!" (we must)
"I would not go back there, no. Not with the fire in me now..." (we must grasp the flame... Fire then, fire now, the fire next time)
What a gorgeous comment. Thank you so much. And yes, not just remembering, but unforgetting.
Sounds like you had a very good teacher!
Wow so articulate Thankyou
Thank you for reading!
This is great!
I love the idea that by not bringing other voices into our minds we’ve “monocropped” our interior lives. And memorization as a practice for occluding my usual crappy train of thought seems liberating! I’m so tired of my cycle of fears a grievances. What a great solution.
I was at a Rilke retreat at a monastery and the leader suggested memorizing some poetry. I’ve always panicked at the thought of work, so I’d never tried before, but this time I worked at it and found it to be really good for me.
I’m also sober a long time and very encouraged by your experience. Thank you!
A Rilke retreat at a monastery?!?! I want to go to that so badly. Glad you ended up memorising some poetry. Let me know if you end up memorising more! One of the members of our memory club is memorising some of the Duino Elegies.
That is fantastic. What a beautiful thing to memorize. The stanza I memorized is short, but took me a couple of weeks to learn.
“The final thing is not self subjugation,
But silent loving from such centeredness
We feel round even rage and desolation
The finally enfolding tenderness.”
This really landed for me. I'm a fairly recent 'convert' to idealism, having read several of Bernardo Kastrup's books last year, plus a couple by Thomas Nagel, and David Bentley Hart's lovely "All Things Are Full of Gods" in the last couple of years. Which is to say I'm still digesting, so to speak. And posts like this definitely help with that. I'm also putting the finishing touches on basic, accessible introduction to idealism. (As much as Feynman-esque 'if I can explain it to a non-expert that means I understand it' exercise as anything else.) And I want to follow it up with articles exploring the implications of and possibilities in idealism.
Really glad this landed! Thank you for reading. Sounds like you’re on a very rich exploration. To be honest, I really struggle to read philosophy! I do read it, but slowly, and I’m certainly not as well versed in it as I could be. I suppose I am an idealist, though I struggle so much with abstraction that I much prefer to investigate those theories through literature. And I think that great literature (and maybe all great art) has always been the sort of active branch or creative laboratory of idealism. The place where it’s enacted and explored, instead of theorized. If that makes sense?
I think exploring philosophy through literature is great. I love a novel that gets into the philosophical forest. (As well as the psychological one.)
One upside of Kastrup’s books is that they’re pretty short. The best intro to his flavor of idealism is one of, if not the, shortest (*Analytical Idealism*, if you are curious).
I’ve been meaning to tell you that I really enjoyed your book-ette. Thanks again for sending it so far!
Ah good! So glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for letting me know.
And yes — philosophical novels. But for me the more powerful literary expression of philosophy is the way, say, Shakespeare enacts the core tenets of idealism in his form. The pentameter seems to body forth the action itself. It’s like a workshop of the philosophical idea and the ideas about imagination that run through his work. Does that make sense? I find it a bit difficult to explain what I mean about this. x
I follow you, though imperfectly I'm sure, as I'm hampered because I don't read as much poetry as I'd like.
I have too many thoughts on this to put them into a comment. I mostly agree. Enough to put a smile on my face. Yes, memory and perception. Busy writing a series sharing my practices of imagination. Trying to word what I think is taking place in me.
I have real bad memory for names and dates and facts and dance-steps. But I have exceptional qualities when it comes to remembering spatially, for the constellation. I feel that what I 'know' is often obstructing presence. That it shouldn't be like a filter, or label level, as is taught in schools. But deep memorization, like done with learning a song, a piece of music, a skill, allows for a new version. Really understanding the 'facts' is very revealing. Two kinds of knowing here, I think. Leave it at this for now...love your work. It's very close to my heart.
Thanks for this, Bertus. Yes, many kinds of knowing. And your note about understanding reminded me of something @Iain McGilchrist said when I saw him speak earlier this autumn: that etymologically, the “under” in “understand” means “among”. It’s a standing among, a taking things together, as a whole, and standing in their presence. In the context of this essay, we could add — in the wholeness of your own presence, too; ideally, bringing a polyphony of remembered voices.
I did a lot of acting earlier in my life and the memorization and delivery of lines did feel like quite a special skill. I too have been thinking that in person oral communication may be the only form we will be able to trust soon, other than by books. Thanks for articulating.
Yes! I've got a friend currently in academia who thinks universities will have to bring back vivas to replace essays and written exams. An interesting thought.
Franchino Gaffurio's image, Music of the Spheres' 15th century, shows the celestial bodies, the Muses and Apollo in a symbolic representation of cosmic harmony. An image to contemplate left & right brain hemispheres in flow, to aid memory practice.
The dance between the muses and Apollo corresponding to right and left brain hemispheres respectively.
I use Jungian active imagination and ekphrasis poetic inquiry to work with imagination / memory, images and felt-sense.
I have had to work on re-trusting my memory.
I hear you. One of our speakers in our memory club is going to be a trauma therapist, talking about when memory keeps us stuck. Sounds like you’re moving forward on your journey. I hope so, and that it feels good. x
Nomadic Storytelling Being ❤️
Yes!
In the spring of 2023, I spent 45 days in a municipal jail in Japan. During that challenging time, I was basically cut off from the English language, and my Japanese isn’t good enough to immerse myself deeply in the Japanese language resources that were available.
One of the fascinating results of that experience was how the resonance of my dreams lasted much longer than in my regular life.
I remember having the insight that modernity, with all of its busy-bee distractions, has eroded the art of dreaming. As fall has brought more dark than light, I’ve been allowing myself more dream time, though I must admit that I’ve been caving in to the powerfully seductive waking world and not allowing the space for the dreams to resonate beyond most mornings.
Your post gave me some inspiration to do that more, so thank you.
Last, I totally agree that the desertification of our external world is linked to the barrenness of our inner world and thank you for that reminder!